Joshua Gayou - Commune - Book One

I nodded.

“Right, well, then I witnessed how well emergency services did bailing people out of Hurricane Katrina. A few years later I saw them get it wrong again in New York with Hurricane Sandy. The point was that three days (the common doctrine I had been raised on) clearly wouldn’t get the job done. During the time I was coming to this revelation, I was also thinking about my retirement.”

“Huh,” muttered Jake. “You don’t look old enough to retire.”

Billy raised his bottle to Jake in a mock salute. “Younger than most but I’ve still been working my ass off in one form or another since I was thirteen. I was looking forward to slowing down. Anyway, I began work on this place here, oh, I guess four years ago now. A significant wad of my life savings went into this place, even at Wyoming prices, and as I was building it, those ideas of self-reliance were carried forward, resulting in the Butler building off the side of the house.” He stopped talking long enough to dump the pasta in and stir the pot some more. “I was following Mormon principles by this point.”

“Mormon?” Jake asked.

“A year’s worth of everything, huh?” I asked.

Billy pointed at me. “She’s got it.” He looked over to Jake. “The Mormons were a big inspiration in what I was trying to do. The concept of self-reliance is encoded into their faith. They counseled their own to be ready for anything, with supplies laid by for various contingencies starting with the typical three-day kits—essentially the bug-out bag concept. On top of that, they kept a three month supply of everyday necessities and a one year supply of long life dried goods like grains, beans, dried milk, and so on. They also stockpiled things like gasoline, tools, and clothes, basically any of the stuff that you can’t easily make for yourself under reasonable circumstances.”

“That’s quite a thing,” said an impressed Jake. “You’re saying all of them were doing that?”

“Oh, well, they were supposed to,” Billy shrugged. “I’m sure you had your sandbaggers in their group just the same as you have in any other. But again, this idea of preparedness is baked into their cultural identity, you see? By and large, these people were just about ready for anything.”

“Weren’t ready for the Plague,” I said.

“Okay, almost anything. Be fair: no one was ready for that.” He turned off the grill and retrieved a colander from an overhead cabinet, which he placed in the sink. Protecting his hands with a dish towel, he poured the spaghetti in to drain.

“Sorry, there’s no butter for this,” he said almost to himself. “Still deciding if I leave the fridge where it is or get rid of it. Takes up a ton of space to not be doing anything.”

He transferred the spaghetti to another bowl, opened the jar of sauce, and poured half of it in. He then looked up, shrugged to himself, and poured in the rest, most likely realizing that he had no cold storage for the opened jar.

He began to stir the bowl. “Anyway, I followed their lead and ended up here. This was all over time, you understand. I did pretty well for myself. I wasn’t rolling in millions’ worth of cash or anything…in fact, most of the money we made at the casino either went straight for the betterment of the tribe and our lands or was just reinvested back into the casino itself. I did earn a comfortable salary during my time running the place, though. Had some luck with my investments. Even so,” he gestured all around at the house with a hand, “doing all of this at once would have hurt. What you’re seeing is the result of several years’ worth of planning, saving, and building.”

“Billy,” I said while placing a hand on his shoulder.

He looked surprised at the gesture. “Yes?”

“On behalf of Jake and myself, I want to thank and congratulate you for being an obsessive doomsday prepper. It turns out the lunatics were right. We concede.”

He rolled his eyes and smiled. Lifting the bowl, he moved over to the dinner table dividing up the space between the kitchen and the family room. “Hey, Girly!” he called. “Come have some dinner!”

“Silverware?” Jake asked.

“The drawer to the left of the sink,” answered Billy. The sound of metallic jangling came from Jake’s direction while I looked into the pantry for more water. The pantry itself was looking bare—there was a half-empty flat of bottled water on the floor, some jarred and canned goods interspersed throughout, and an opened box of crackers. I grabbed some water bottles and went to sit at the table as Elizabeth came wandering in. Billy pulled a handful of plates from a cabinet and set them out at one end of the table. We sat down, and he began to serve out spaghetti to all of us.

“Like I was saying,” Billy continued, “the hobby started with this concept of food supplies, but the more I did, the more I thought of that I could be doing. Suppose I needed something while basic services and infrastructure was down? I could survive here on the food I’d packed in for plenty of time, but I might not be able to get my hands on new things that I needed, so I added a woodshop. It had the added benefit that I’d be able to fix things that broke as well.”

He stopped talking to have a bite. I was shocked to see that a significant portion of the food on my plate had disappeared down my mouth. After weeks of nothing but MREs, canned goods, and prepackaged foods like protein bars, a simple plate of pasta was gourmet eating.

“Adding in a new feature or capability always exposed another area I was lacking. I added a woodshop but that really only covered the ability to work with wooden things. I should add a machine or metal shop, right? Well, I never got to that—it was just on the list of things to do. I put solar on the Butler Building so that I could power everything in the event of a grid failure, which made me realize that the main house would be S.O.L. I had planned to put some solar on this house as well but just didn’t get to that in time. I had to compromise.”

“Compromise how?” Jake asked.

“Propane generator. There are ten, one hundred pound propane tanks lined up along the wall out in that garage; I’ll point them out to you the next time we’re in there. You store propane as a liquid, and one tank holds almost twenty-four gallons. It’s something like two-hundred-seventy times more compact as a liquid, so there’s a ton of gas out there. I don’t recall the math to determine how many joules of energy are stored in one full tank, but the answer is a lot . The very best thing is that propane won’t decay like gasoline or diesel will. The stuff will last forever. Our only challenge is finding more when we run out. Our limitation there is that we have to count on all the tanks and storage facilities failing over time, leaking it all away into the atmosphere. I don’t know when that will happen but, when it does, we won’t be getting any more of the stuff until someone figures out how to pull it out of the ground and bottle it again.”

“Does that mean we could watch movies on the TV in here?” asked Elizabeth.

“Well, yes, but I don’t think we want to burn up our emergency energy watching movies,” Billy said. At her disappointed expression, he quickly amended: “Hey, maybe we have movie nights every so often, though. We can’t be running stuff around the clock, but we’ll have special nights sometimes for movies, okay?”

Elizabeth seemed to think about this compromise for a moment; finally smiled and gave him a thumbs-up.

“Is it alright if I have some more?” I asked, gesturing at the bowl.

Jake sat up and looked over the bowl at my plate. “Damn, dude.”

“It’s good !” I barked defensively.